Monthly Archives: April 2014

Shadab: What are some of the glaring and subtle differences between the Western tradition of poetry and the Eastern, in your experience as a translator?

Sam: This would take a book to answer properly. Chinese is rhyme-rich, while English is rhyme poor. Chinese and Japanese poets use “pillow words,” a fixed epithet that gives a double-meaning. When our Asian poet speaks of “clouds and rain,” it may be about weather, but it also may be about sex. Clouds are masculine, rain is feminine. And individual Chinese characters often contain two or three or even four distinct meanings all at once, so the translator must choose a primary single meaning in English and “dumb it down” for the western reader. Classical Chinese poetry is chanted, not simply spoken. Classical Japanese poetry is loaded with sensibility, nuance and social awareness and often makes use of “honkadori,” “shadows and echoes” of classics both Japanese and Chinese. Translation is a provisional conclusion and great poetry needs to be translated freshly for each generation.

Shadab: What can we learn from Eastern aesthetics— in particular, the Chinese tradition?

Sam: Confucian exactitude of language, Taoist-Buddhist “non-attachment,” and most of all something about great human character at its core. Rexroth called Tu Fu “the greatest non-epic, non-dramatic poet ever,” and I think that reflects what he saw as Tu Fu’s character. As Heraclitus says, “Our character is our fate.” I think most classical Chinese poets would concur. I could make a similar case for Basho or Saigyo in Japanese.

You know I lurve me some Sam Hamill. Interviews with him aren’t exactly in abundance either, so I have to give thanks to 3QD for being the type of site to publish one of them. (Like I said before, you might want to consider supporting them if you’re able; they do some great work.)

The chilling effect of insisting on real names stifles political and other controversial discussions, inhibiting people from stating their views on gun laws, feminism, terrorism, abortion, climate change and so on. When such debates are held face to face, in cafes and over dinner tables, there is little concern that, say, a future employer will learn what you said and decline to hire you (unless you have the misfortune to live in a regime with a Stasi-like network of citizen-spies), but as the internet increasingly becomes the venue of choice for such discussions, any opinion stated under your real name is trivially accessible. For anyone in a vulnerable position – people seeking a job, people whose beliefs are at odds with their neighbors or co-workers – the ability to participate in such discussions depends, effectively, on being able to do so pseudonymously.

…Online, using pseudonyms is actually more like our ordinary face-to-face experience – and it is essential for managing the impression we make. Face to face, we develop relationships in separate contexts — and the things we talk about, the jokes we make, the secrets we reveal – vary tremendously. You may share, say, your feelings about the difficulties of caring for an aging, fading parent or a special needs child with others in the same situation; you may find things funny in the company of old friends that you would never admit to thinking humorous in front of your family. You present yourself differently to your neighbor, lawyer, teacher, children, grandmother — you use different words and talk about different things. This is not a lack of integrity, but a feature of being an adaptable person in multiple social contexts, understanding the varied mores of the different situations. Pseudonyms allow us to maintain such separate contexts online.

Will Shetterly is correct; this is an excellent perspective on the tired old free speech debate:

The basis of the argument is that “the right to free speech means the government can’t arrest you for what you say.” In the context of capitalism, that’s an incredibly reductionist definition. If speech is supposed to be free, we must ask: who owns the means by which speech is expressed and transmitted in the modern world? Who owns the newspapers? Who owns the TV channels? Who owns Twitter? Who owns Facebook? Who owns the film production studios? Who owns the ISPs? And so on. The answer is always the same: not the government. Not the people, either. All of these things are owned by capital. All of these things are industries.

So, in a situation where public discourse takes place in privately-owned spaces, how are the handful of people who ultimately own most of the media any different from a government? Apart from the lack of any kind of system of democratic control or a pretense of accountability, that is.

…Ultimately, what this comic is selling is a strange libertarian capitalist fantasy of freedom, where freedom is defined solely as freedom from government interference, but freedom from the structures of authority produced by the accumulation of capital is never considered.

The value of the argument aside, it’s a fun bonus to imagine how many of XKCD’s readers would likely be mortally offended at the suggestion that they’ve internalized libertarian capitalist values.

Everyone should be reading Capital in the 21st Century. Especially if you are broke and working hard just to stay afloat and your self-esteem gets caught up in it, you wonder, why can’t I just afford to live in a city that I like, what is wrong with me, why am I failing at being a person? Explanation here.

That’s weird — Crispin, who normally has nothing but scorn for the platitudinous advice genre, seems to be using a weighty book about economics to shield the self-help book she’s apparently got tucked within its pages. Erotic intensity, indeed:

Piketty’s terror at rising inequality is an important data point for the reader. It has perhaps influenced his judgment and his tendentious reading of his own evidence. It could also explain why the book has been greeted with such erotic intensity: It meets the need for a work of deep research and scholarly respectability which affirms that inequality, as Cassidy remarked, is “a defining issue of our era.”

Maybe. But nobody should think it’s the only issue. For Piketty, it is. Aside from its other flaws, “Capital in the 21st Century” invites readers to believe not just that inequality is important but that nothing else matters.

Sid Lowe, in an article on Atlético Madrid manager Diego Simeone, Atlético’s upcoming Champions League game against Chelsea, and former Atlético and current Chelsea striker Fernando Torres:

But the coach would not be drawn on whether the Manchester United job would interest him. “With all due respect, and I appreciate that it is important to you, this is a really big game tomorrow night and I don’t want to think about anything that’s not my team, my players, or Chelsea,” he said.

Paul Wilson, in an article on Manchester City manager Manuel Pellegrini and City’s victory over West Bromwich Albion, during which David Silva picked up a potentially serious ankle injury:

Inevitably Pellegrini was asked what he thought about the David Moyes situation but was unwilling to comment. “I cannot talk about rumours,” was his curt reply.

In other news, temperatures in the region over the next few days are expected to be cool, in the upper 50s, with clouds and showers, but the meteorologist adamantly refused to offer any speculation as to who should replace Moyes if, as seems likely, his sacking is imminent.

Now, now! I can hear you starting to hyperventilate from here. No need to assume the worst. Allow me to explain:

• TIME. I have three jobs — a “day job” and two of my own self-employed, working-mostly-from-home side jobs. There’s at least several days a month where I work something like a typical shift from nine-ish till four-ish, then come home, eat a quick meal, and put in another few hours on one of the other jobs until bedtime. I’m not complaining — I pretty much enjoy my work, it pays the bills, and it absolutely beats climbing on roofs in the blazing July sun or inching on my belly through a filthy crawl space, as I had to do a few years ago. But even an antisocial bore like me has other things to do sometimes, and a couple hours before bed isn’t always enough time to scour the web looking for things to write about.

Speaking of other things to do, I want to start devoting more time to my first love, music. Long before I ever considered trying to capture my thoughts in prose, I was writing and recording songs. Rheumatoid arthritis put that facet of my artistic expression on indefinite hiatus, and momentum, once lost, is hard to generate again. But now, personal technology being what it is these days, I no longer have to be content with my old, lo-fi, basement 4-track recordings. A friend of mine with a home studio and extensive recording experience has offered to help me if I need it, so I’m going to go through my old songs, rewrite some of them, and attempt to record final versions I can proudly listen to for the rest of my life.

• INSPIRATION. One thing I’ve noticed, when forced to go several days without much web browsing, is how difficult it is to get back into the swing of it. Some of it is information overload — there’s just too much stuff competing for attention, most of it ephemeral and worthless. For an introvert like me, it’s very similar to the real-life feeling of walking into a frenetic environment full of frivolous chatter. It takes a while to get used to it, and the temptation is always to get quickly irritated and walk off in a huff. Rolf Dobelli was correct — I’ve read books written twenty years ago that still provide more knowledge, context and perspective than anything I’m likely to encounter on the web. (And lord knows I’ve still got a two-foot tower of books waiting to be read.)

Over the last few years, I’ve been averaging slightly over a post per day. I found it useful to aim for that standard, because I could easily have been the sort of person to endlessly nitpick over a post otherwise. The relaxed, informal medium of blogging is good for countering that tendency — get the idea down with a minimum of fuss, publish and move on. You can always return to the topic again later if you think of anything else to add. But I think I’ve gotten all the benefits I can from that approach by now. And in all honesty, I’m not possessed of much depth or breadth to my knowledge. I have a pretty limited bailiwick, and I’ve covered just about everything within it, sometimes repeatedly. (See here, ferzample. What can I possibly add to what I’ve already said?) I’ve never wanted to write crap just to fill space, and I’ve never wanted to repeat myself just because it’s what I, or others, have come to expect. I’m not trying to create a personal brand here, or supply people with predictable entertainment. Calling myself an official “writer” would seem absurdly pretentious and overly serious, though, and calling this blog a journey of my personal growth and development would be nauseatingly sappy and New Age workshop-y, so I guess I’ll repeat what I said before: if anything, I’m aiming to emulate the informal, irreverent spirit of Montaigne’s Essays, while possibly becoming better as both a writer and thinker. I enjoy those things for their own sake, with no thought of recognition or reward. Now, though, I think I’d prefer to spend days, or even weeks, collecting my thoughts and writing them down, as opposed to hours. William Deresiewicz was also correct — eventually, you need to allow time for your reservoir to refill if there’s going to be any depth to your thought. (Coincidentally, that’s the topic of another book I’ll be reading soon.)

With all that said, let me reiterate: I’m probably going to be posting less frequently. I’m not quitting, and I don’t ever intend to. I truly love the amateur writing I do here. I just think the pace of my output will noticeably decrease, and thought it would only be polite to let you know in advance. I would not be at all surprised, though, if the Fates or some mischievous trickster deity arranged for me to look incredibly foolish in saying this by dropping a bunch of irresistible material on me at various times — indeed, I almost expect it. There may be bursts of activity punctuating fallow periods. And, who knows, if things continue to go according to plan, I may very well find myself with enough free time to make all this time-budgeting moot. So, we’ll see, but that’s how it’s shaping up at the moment.

Of course free speech doesn’t mean you have a right to not be criticized or a right to occupy every forum. But the way in which contempt for the very term “free speech” has become one of those cultural signals that are the glue of today’s bourgie elite progressivism can and will lead to actual, no bullshit suppression of speech. A liberalism that claims that rights are only denied if tanks are rolling through the streets is a pathetic liberalism and one that stands in direct and stark contrast to the history of the principled left.

As if on cue, XKCD provides the conventional wisdom in picture form. Look, I’ll just say that, as in many other instances, there’s a letter of the law and a spirit of the law, and I’m pretty sure that all these disingenuous, loophole-seeking motherfuckers know the difference.

Despite this burgeoning population, deer remain elusive creatures, and seeing one is always a bit magical, like an encounter with a creature from another age. Menaces to the environment though they may be, they are beautiful to the eye and seem to walk in a kind of enchanted air, in a world very much their own, to which we can have no access.

Ah, I used to be romantic like that. My adolescent sympathies lay with the Calvin & Hobbes cartoon. Years of nighttime driving in my old job turned me more into Louis C.K., though:

We have to have names for things in order to communicate with each other about them. If we were to call what is now called Buddhism “realism,” as Nishijima Roshi suggested would one day happen, this could be confusing. These days the word “realism” generally seems to be synonymous with “materialism.” And Buddhism isn’t materialism.

We could just make up a new word. But that has drawbacks. It’s like the people who are concerned about the grammatical necessity of using gendered pronouns in English who propose to use new words like zhe, ze or zir instead of he or she. It’s awkward and nobody knows what the hell you’re talking about.

Maybe eventually we’ll get a word that works. But not yet. So we’re stuck with “Buddhism” for now.

Stuck. As in, immobile, solid, entrenched. You know what loosens such bonds? Water, that’s right. Let the waves of enlightenment wash over you and dissolve the conceptual concrete in your mind.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.